Advice (and moral support) please re: changing women's language

Bea Jaspert wrote an article on this that I found oddly compelling. Obviously I am fully aware of the situation, but I think bringing it all together the way she does sends a powerful message about the end point of all this.

beajaspert.substack.com/p/lets-form-an-alliance

Clear and accurate language is the cornerstone of good safeguarding and healthcare and this particularly applies to children and all vulnerable adults. Words you are using to describe your own body and what happens to it.

Could you say something about how it’s important to find the right balance amongst all minority groups, vulnerable people and people with special needs so that everyone can easily access the services and provisions that the need and feel able to use the correct language (ie not be laughed at, cause offence or be misunderstood). This applies verbally and in reading and writing - and not just in health awareness but in legally binding documents such as consent forms.

Different groups need to be considered. I’ve been looking at this for something else and it is high numbers:

English as a second language - for 10% of the population English is their second language. 1.3% of the population can speak English but not well and 0.3% cannot speak English at all. (2011 census). So 6.6m people affected.

Young people - 19% of the population are under 16. (As 2018 - ONS website)

Elderly people - people over 65 =12m people/ people over 75 = 5.4m people (Age UK website)

Autism affects 0.9% of the population. 5.5m people (Autism society website)

Illiteracy- 16.4% of people in England are described as having ‘very poor literacy skills’ (Literary trust website) so 7.1m people in England alone.

Learning disabilities- 1.5m people have a learning disability (350,000 are classed as severe) (NHS website)

Religious/cultural groups (can’t see the numbers - but I mean different areas of the country having their own dialects, groups having their own rules on education and opportunity, distrust of public bodies etc)

In addition to the points made, stress that it’s not inclusive to remove words describing the majority of the population, that it’s reductive to label women as body parts and this is something that is exclusively happening to women so why would anyone motivated by an interest in equal rights advocate for this.

Ask if it is not exclusive of many other people with protected characteristics: those who speak English as a second language ( indirect racial discrimination) especially those with languages with gender concepts like French), people with autism who will find the concept of speaking other than the truth very difficult and will have a whole new level of stress added to communications with others that can be very challenging, people with learning difficulties who may have difficulty with speech, people with dementia . So are you being kind and inclusive of all these people who are all protected under the Equality Act and why do they deserve less respect, kindness and protection

A few points:

• If it's OK to erase the words "woman", "mother", etc, why are we not also erasing the words "man", "father"? There's a huge double standard here and I would encourage people to think about why that is (hint: misogyny)

• Sex discrimination exists. Violence against women exists. We still live in a patriarchy. So if you erase the word "woman" you have no way of naming the problems, let alone addressing them.

• if words are important to trans people when it comes to their identity, what about people who feel that being a woman (biological female) is important to their identity? Why do a small minority get to dictate how the majority describe themselves?

Also see 4w.pub/the-move-to-erase-women-from-periods-pregnancy-and-parenting/

I'd probably lose my temper and tell the young woman to checknher goddamn privilege and think about not excluding immigrants.

I've just been talking on another thread about doing A-level French, which is certainly a higher level of formal education in a second language than you can assume any refugee has, especially women from countries that don't value women's education. That puts me, or at least younger me at B2 level in French.

Do you think I know the word cervix? No I bloody don't. We didn't do how to talk about women's health issues without mentioning women. Circuitous language, even if it avoids polysyllabic vocabulary, is a very high level of language. We did straight-forward commentary on nuclear power and recycling, leavened with learning to make anodyne analysis of French literary classics.

I did not do cervix, person with a cervix, uterus or fallopian tubes. In fact, I am certain that the majority of my class didn't know what a cervix was in English.

And now we're expecting more of immigrants in our health information pamphlets than would be expected of teens hoping to do French at university! It is horrendous class-privilege.

It is harmful to refer to women as people

The inability of the world to see and respect the differences between women and men , the fact that the default person is male , costs lives. Female lives

Invisible women book

@SybillTrelawney I really think that you need to be clear, succinct and bullet-pointed. Your listeners clearly have closed minds and the attention span of a gnat, so be concise...

• if you erase women you have no way of describing 51% of the population
• If you erase women you are erasing women's sports. Period.
• if you erase women you have no more women MPs, no more women doctors. You are putting women back to where they were before the suffragettes.
• male privilege is A THING
• but we can only call out men's privilege if we have a thing called women

No point being wordy. Or 'kind'. That's their game.

I messaged you but I just remembered another personal example.

Growing up my brothers best friend’s mother barely spoke or read English. My brothers friend translated anything she needed to know. (Kids translating for parents was far from unusual where I grew up). Easy for a teenage boy to tell his mum, ‘it says women need to have this checkup at the doctors’ pretty much impossible for a teenage boy to try and explain the term ‘cervix’ to his mother in a language he didn’t speak very well.

But I don’t suppose working class immigrant women are the sort of minorities that matter to the sort of person who thinks changing the language to remove easy to understand terms specific to women should be done to please biological males.

I have another friend who died from cervical cancer. For some of us this is really personal.

Gender, which is often termed 'sex role' when thinking of other species is the thing which trans people are attempting to change. Or at least they are attempting to change the outward representation of their sex role since many trans people report to have always felt like the other gender.

Biological sex is assigned at conception and is linked to several characteristics, including genetics and appearance of reproductive organs.

Biological sex is what should be being referred to by medical professionals when talking about reproductive health as it is the most relevant in these circumstances. Therefore, women have periods, women breastfeed, women ovulate, women give birth.

Biological men do not do these things. They may wish to change their name to a female name, to be referred to as she and express themselves as stereotypically female which is OK, and something we should all be supportive of to make sure these individuals are included in society. These people should have the same rights as everyone else.

None of this should be controversial. This is basic bio.